The ‘school of devotion’: Imagination and cognition in medieval meditations on Christ

This dissertation focuses on the best-known literary form of “popular” devotion in the late Middle Ages, the meditation on the life and passion of Christ, or gospel meditation. Locating the meditation\u27s origins in late thirteenth-century scholasticism, the dissertation begins with Bonaventure\u27s theory of mental images, according to which mental images receive the aid of illumination to convert knowledge of the natural world into knowledge of God, to the extent possible. Bonaventure uses this theory, in dialogue with the cognitive theories of his contemporaries, to establish the theological validity of imagining Christ\u27s life systematically in gospel meditations. Although early fourteenth-century theologians dismantle their predecessors\u27 theories of cognition, Bonaventure\u27s understanding of mental images and imagination persists in Latin and English gospel meditations. Thus texts such as the Meditationes vitae Christi embrace the complexity of Bonaventure\u27s cognitive theory by entrusting mental images to effect spiritual enlightenment. Likewise belonging to this tradition is William Langland\u27s ever enigmatic character Ymaginatif. Uniquely capable of transforming material into spiritual knowing, Ymaginatif adopts Bonaventure\u27s epistemological system even as corrupt clerics destroy it by impeding lay access to spiritual knowledge. Thus, although gospel meditations are typically understood as unsophisticated and lay because of their reliance on mental images, I argue that there is little in their early development to support such a reading. Only with the advent of the fifteenth century do thinkers treat imagination, and the gospel meditations based on it, as fanciful. Most clearly endorsing this position is Nicholas Love, who presents imagination as inherently material and unreliable in his translation of the Meditationes . Equating imagination and affect with lay piety, Love argues that gospel meditations constitute a valid exercise for lay people precisely because meditations lack spiritual efficacy. Love\u27s reading, however, is not generally applicable to earlier or later gospel meditations, and thus this project revises the common assumption that mental images, like visual ones, were quaint tools of devotion designed for simple lay consumption in the Middle Ages